Trump has trashed America’s most important alliance. The rift with
Pompeo was unlikely to be received warmly on his farewell tour, even before the insurrection at the US Capitol last Wednesday. For many, Trump’s incitement of rioters was the final straw.
The foreign minister of Luxembourg openly called Trump a “pyromaniac,” while diplomats are privately saying they “blame Trump squarely for the chaos in America since the election, including the Capitol riot,” as one did to CNN, reflecting the sentiments of others in the same role.
“It was clearly not going to be a congenial trip, as many European institutions and diplomats are happily turning their back on the Trump administration. It’s no secret that Europe is very much looking forward to working with Biden,” said Tyson Barker, a senior Europe analyst and former State Department official under Barack Obama.
This week’s snub of Pompeo brings an ignominious end to four years of exacerbation with a White House that went out of its way to burn bridges with allies who were caught off guard by the election of Trump, then horrified at his administration’s inability to rein in his worst instincts.
“From our perspective, Trump saw Europe as an enemy,” a senior European diplomat told CNN. “The lasting impact of ‘America First’ is the US having fewer friends in Europe.”
A senior European Union official said the general view in Brussels was that Trump went out of his way to “gradually undo a lot of what the EU was working towards on the world stage,” pointing specifically to the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accord.
While the assumption is that the transatlantic relationship will improve under Biden, four years of carnage has spooked the European political scene.
“The European relationship has changed and will now be shrouded in skepticism,” said Cathryn Cluver Ashbrook, executive director of the Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship at the Harvard Kennedy School.
“The arrival of a Biden administration has yet to be embraced with the same fanfare as Obama as President-elect, because Trump has done more damage to the relationship than George W. Bush. Trump’s outward aggression affected all aspects of European life, be it trade, defense or even the emotional shared ideas and cultural ties. All those things suddenly seem debased and of less value.”
The repudiation of shared ideas and cultural ties Cluver describes are one prong of the fork that has punctured the alliance. According to Barker, officials in European capitals were agog at the types of people Trump employed to work as envoys overseas.
“Europeans have considered the last four years extremely distasteful. They’ve been bemused by Trump’s envoys, like Richard Grenell in Germany, who have turned up and started behaving like Fox News anchors and insulting the country they were supposed to be building relations with,” Barker said.
Another prong has been the practical implication of Trump’s approach to foreign policy. “Trump’s disengagement and hollowing out of the State Department…
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